Problem with single quotes

[Andreas Yankopolus]

I'm trying to write some Octave code that's compatible with Matlab.  
One of the differences is that Matlab uses single quotation marks, and  
I quickly ran into problems with Octave's handling of them. The  
following command should print a single quotation mark, but it gives a  
syntax error:

printf ('\'');

I'm running Octave 3.0.0 on Ubuntu Hardy installed via the package  
manger. The same problem occurs on Octave 3.0.2 on OS X installed via  
Fink.

Am I doing something wrong? Is this a bug?

Thanks,

Andreas